All language subtitles for Jeffrey Smart (Catherine Hunter 2022)

MAN: I find it funny that,
perhaps in 100 years time,

if people look at paintings
done by the artists of this century -

of our century -

that the most ubiquitous things

like motorcars and television sets
and telephones

don't appear in any of the pictures.

We should paint
the things around us.

Motor cars are very beautiful.

I'm a great admirer
of Giorgio Morandi,

and we all love Morandi.

And he had all his props,
his different bottles and his things.

See, my props are
petrol stations and trucks,

and it's just the same thing.

It's a different range of things.

MAN 2: He created a new aesthetic
out of 20th century technology.

Subjects that others found
banal and brutal and uninteresting,

to him, were really just
part of a new kind of beauty.

It made so many people
revisit their own response

to 20th-century technology.

WOMAN: He sets up a stage set.

I think his work
is incredibly theatrical.

And what he's doing
is he's inviting the viewer

to bring their own stories.

and the viewer becomes
a participant in the work.

I really don't want to talk
about the paintings at all.

There's no point in talking
about painting, is there?

I mean, the paintings should say
everything that's there.

WOMAN: What's really significant
about a centenary

and the kind of idea of a centenary

is it actually does afford you
a perspective

that you can look back and reflect,
with a completely fresh perspective,

on an artist whose work
we know really well.

But it's the distance
that time allows -

you can actually situate that work

and see it in context,
in new and different ways.

None of his works
are entirely abstract,

nor are they entirely
solely about the narrative.

There's always a kind of clash
between those two ideas.

In many ways,
the show sort of tries to show

the full spectrum
kind of these approaches.

I think what is very clever about

him not wanting to talk too much
or explain too much

about the paintings

is that it does
leave them open-ended.

So if you want to
come to Jeffrey's paintings

and you just want to look at them
for what they are,

for what you see,
that's fine.

But they also can be triggers
for imaginative responses.

So they are like these stage sets.

And in Holiday, he's setting up
this apartment block,

which we can all relate to,

and especially after COVID,

where people were shut up
in apartment blocks or houses,

and that balcony became
a really important focus

for looking out at the world.

But we can bring
our own stories to them.

ARCHIVE VOICEOVER:
Wide and handsome thoroughfares

are a feature of
Light's model plan of Adelaide.

A busy shopping centre
of the city is Rundle Street.

Almost without exception,

every suburban home
has its gardens and flowers.

And here is a typical scene
in the suburbs of Adelaide.

MAN: Jeffrey Smart was born
in Adelaide in 1921,

in a middle-class family.

He had a very happy life,
a normal childhood.

He was probably
a fairly precocious child.

During the Depression,

his family had to rent out
their house in Hawthorne,

which is a reasonably nice suburb
in Adelaide,

and go to a small flat
in South Terrace,

on the edge of the city centre.

And really for Jeffrey,
this was a great thing.

You know, he would ride his bicycle

around the streets
of inner-city Adelaide.

He would go to the movies.

The urban environment already
provided so much inspiration.

And it was quite ironic

because his parents couldn't wait
to get back to the suburbs.

But Jeffrey was secretly hoping

that they could stay
in the inner city.

And you get a feeling of, like,

where he's going to go to from there
in his work.

Our flat was on the first floor,

and it had French doors looking out
over the Park Lands.

And then the back part of the flat,
which was the kitchen,

that overlooked the slums.

And that's the bit
that always fascinated me,

much more than the gum trees
and the park and the distant hills.

Yes, I think I've got
a natural flair for squalor.

I always like the look of the...
of that confusion of chimneys

and temporary erections
and things going across

and pipes and telegraph poles

and all that nest of things going on,
that fascinated me.

And I did drawings of them,
of course.

I don't think there
was any clear decision, ever,

to be a painter.

I think I always wanted to
paint and draw,

but I...it was a sort of a dream.

I was just always
drawing and painting at home,

and I was always filling up
any books, exercise books, anything,

with drawings.

It was an art teacher
who said to me once,

"I think you'll probably be able
to exhibit a picture one day.

"When you grow up, you know,

"in the Society of Arts in Adelaide."

And I've never forgotten that,

'cause I thought,
"God, how unbelievable."

And I thought, "Oh, she's joking."

It couldn't be true.

Fancy her thinking that. (LAUGHS)

HART: Jeffrey seemed to
have this proclivity for

a kind of edginess
in the landscapes that he went for.

You know, he was hugely inspired
by T.S. Eliot's poem The Wasteland.

And what T.S. Eliot spoke about

were these broken images
that came out of the First World War

and seemed very current
to artists like Jeffrey

and coming through the Depression,
that he'd grown up in.

But he was kind of drawn
to these ideas of landscapes

where everything
doesn't kind of feel quite right.

There's this sense of broken images

or abandoned buildings

and deserted landscapes.

EDWARDS: He's also travelling out
to the Flinders Ranges,

struck then by
the drought-affected landscape,

the abandoned towns out there

that show the kind of
a less-triumphant image, I suppose,

of the Australian landscape,

that we would associate
with an artist like Hans Heysen.

Jeffrey did a number of paintings
called The Wasteland,.

And you see the way that he's
picking up on his own environment,

so, the environment
of South Australia,

and he's bringing that atmosphere
that Eliot had in his poetry -

obviously referring to Europe -

into the South Australian landscape.

So already you're
getting those connections

and Eliot's poetry really talks
about everyday, ordinary things.

And, you know,
Jeffrey is very well known

for saying that he didn't want
to paint the picturesque billabongs,

he wanted to paint
real, everyday life.

And I think he really gets that
from Eliot, in the early days.

And so you see, in this work,

there's, like,
a bed that is falling apart.

You get the detritus of life.

You get the bank
that has actually been abandoned.

And so there's this irony
in the work,

and also this feeling
of a haunted space.

PEARCE: This was the perfect image
of the wasteland,

which was the transience of
human presence in the landscape,

which evokes questions of eternity.

What is it that lasts?
Well, nothing lasts.

There's a bleakness
in Jeffrey Smart's work.

You can find it right through,
actually,

it's not just in
those South Australian landscapes.

There is a sense of emptiness.

It's almost a hint of
alien-ness in his landscapes.

But what he's saying is that
it is bleak, but it's beautiful.

Even when we go to images
like a holiday resort,

it's often got
this uncanny, unsettling feeling

that everything's not quite right.

You're not sure what's going on,

but it's not exactly
the holiday you would choose.

SMART: It was an early painting,

and it was done where we always went
every year, down to Port Elliot.

I got to know Port Elliot very well.

And I painted the picture
and it didn't work, really.

It wasn't working.

And then I thought, well,
just stare at it and look.

And I thought, "Oh, I know.
It needs the moon in it."

So then I tried to match the sky

and then paint the moon
onto the paint,

and that came out
slightly differently.

So it looks as though
the moon's on a cloud.

Well, that looks rather good.

It still looked wrong.

Needed something in the foreground.

And I was in town one day
with my sketchbook

and I thought, "I know what I'll do,

"I'll draw a perambulator."

So I went into the
perambulator section of the store,

which was Myer's Emporium,

and with my sketchbook,
I drew a perambulator.

And then I got back to the studio

and I then just put it in
on the bottom left,

and there it was - it worked.

So then it came together.

A painting's really quite
a synthesis of things, isn't it?

Always.

And, you know, when we think back
to those early Adelaide works,

what's so interesting
is the way that

he gets onto an urban environment.

You know, he's really interested
in the nitty-gritty of daily life.

He's finding himself.

It was a really important
training ground

to be in that environment.

I knew not to get a job
at the art school in Adelaide,

because I thought
then you'll be, you'll be trapped.

I knew the only way
I could escape from Adelaide

was through painting.

There was this big competition
for the Jubilee,

the Australian Jubilee in 1951,

and there was a...
it was a huge prize - was 500 quid -

and I really worked on it.

In this case,
Jeffrey went out into the landscape.

Now, Wallaroo
is a copper mining town

on the Spencer Gulf coast
of South Australia

and he really wanted to
get the feel of the place.

So he went and he drew things
like the fence posts

and the deserted feeling
of the town,

with abandoned buildings.

And he made these little sketches
and he made some watercolours.

And while he was there,

there were actually two young men
who came out of the ocean.

They'd been fishing
in a little fishing boat.

And they were carrying
this fishing boat out of the water.

And it becomes a really key motif
in the finished painting.

Once I got to Sydney,
I managed to get myself a job

teaching painting...

..in the Education Department.

And while I was doing that teaching,

the results of
the Jubilee Art Prize came,

and I'd won it.

Quite unbelievable.

So this was a great moment for him,

because at that point in his life,

he was really struggling
financially.

He was having a very hard time
making ends meet.

He was struggling with
his sense of direction.

And here was this prize, you know,

judged by important people
in the art world.

So it was a real moment
of recognition.

So Wallaroo was like
his farewell painting to Adelaide,

but it was also a sense where

he had achieved something
in his artistic career.

Hello, girls and boys.
And welcome to the art gallery.

We're having a walk
through the art gallery today.

EDWARDS: It was a difficult time
for his painting, in many ways,

because he was so busy
working in other roles.

He was working as an art critic,

but he also worked as Phidias
on the Argonauts,

which was a radio and then
television program for children

really talking about art
and instructing about art.

He developed a cult following.

I suspect he was hugely charismatic
to children.

Now, you see, that is an ordinary,
everyday thing, isn't it?

There's the electric jug
and the toast rack

and some shadows,
rather nice shadows, made by them.

And what a good idea.

And I think it proves that
just everyday things

make good subjects...

Jeffrey came into my life
in the Argonauts,

and he was Phidias,
the art master of this club.

And we'd all joined the club,

and so we'd send in
paintings and drawings,

and he was like
the greatest teacher.

It was so exciting.

On a tiny little
black-and-white screen,

we suddenly saw that
people were interested

in things that we did like that.

If you did a painting or a drawing,

there was someone as amazing as him
in Sydney

who was actually interested enough
to talk about it.

Well, now, the next picture
I'm going to show you

is some watercolours,
it's a watercolour of some boats.

And I think this is a beauty,
this one.

It's watercolour of just boats
and simply painted it.

I'm sure it's been done on the spot.

And then he had a competition.

He announced this competition
about going to Japan.

And I won the South Australian
section of it.

And so, age 14, I went to Japan

with people
I'd never met before in my life

and it was unbelievable,
unbeliev...

I've never gotten over it.
He changed me.

He changed my life.

Even though
I didn't end up a painter,

he...he opened the world to me.

He opened possibilities.

You know, nothing was a problem.

It didn't matter that you were

a little convent girl virgin
in Adelaide, in the suburbs,

you know what I mean?

You could do things.

You could go places, see things
that you've never forgotten.

Now, just below that
is a very, very good abstraction.

That is a black background.

And everywhere
where the circles overlap,

there's another colour.

So you can imagine it makes
a very beautiful pattern.

You know, you can make abstractions
with anything.

You can do it with, well,
circles and squares

and all sorts of things.

I think this idea of abstraction
and reality coming together

is really fascinating with Jeffrey.

Abstract Expressionism was
coming into being by the '60s,

and becoming more prominent
in Australia.

And he felt he didn't fit in
because he was a realist painter.

His friends were saying,
"Can you just loosen up?

"Can you loosen up
and let that brushwork go?"

And he was like,
"No, I have to stay true to myself."

But it was a real internal turmoil.

But what's also like
the flipside of that

is that Jeffrey says,
actually, later in life,

he said it's all about abstraction.

PEARCE: By the time
he became a teacher,

he told his students very clearly

what he was going to
do with his life.

"I'm going to Sydney for 10 years

"and then I'm going
to live in Italy."

Italy was his Valhalla.

It was the place that
he really wanted to finish up.

Jeffrey left Australia in 1963,

arrived in '64, settled in Rome.

And he loved Rome. He thought
it was the most brilliant city.

Rome seemed to be the centre
of all things in the mid-'60s

It was where the great films
were being made by Fellini,

and it was...
it had a pizzazz about it.

I like Italy because
it's such a modern country.

You know, it's modern.

It is this-century.

I enjoy living in
a really modern place.

Jeffrey found himself in Italy

in a world that was at once
old and new.

And the new world of Italy
was startlingly beautiful to him.

There was a lot of
rebuilding going on -

the building of the roads,
the buildings.

The technology that
was all around, evident,

as the country was recovering itself
after the Second World War

became the perfect subject for him.

There just seem to be a policy

of making the kind of design
of this new industrial world -

not only in Rome,
but the whole of Italy

exactly Jeffrey's cup of tea
for his painting.

It was geometric.
It was clean, crisp colours.

Um...

And it was a very striking world
that he came to.

MAN: I think he
wanted to avoid something.

He wanted to avoid that nationalism.

He wanted to avoid
this persistent idea in Australia

that the arts are somehow
a tool or a weapon

in a process of national discovery

and in defining
the Australian identity.

He didn't want to be mixed up
in that argument.

He would have been under constant
pressure, had he been here.

He would have been asked,

"Why aren't you painting
more of Australia?"

And he avoided that
by not being here.

I think, like other people,

when he went to Italy at that time,
it was very cheap.

Strangers found it easy
to settle in there,

because Italy had already
had a tradition of 200 years

of taking, you know, strangers in

and letting them do
whatever they wanted to do.

For a visual point of view,

it offers all that amazing culture
of the visual

that belongs to
Italian painting and sculpture.

But also, the landscape itself

is almost too beautiful
for a painter.

So it might drive you to
look for beauty somewhere else,

as Jeff does,
in a kind of industrial world

a world that looks as if it's a blot

on that perfect beauty
of the Italian landscape.

I always liked the slightly
dis-arranged look in Italy.

I always liked the Italian 'mess'.

I remember noticing in France

how the petunias and the geraniums

were in beautiful vases.

Then I got to the border
at Ventimiglia

and you get into Italy

and you'd find the geraniums
in old kerosene tins

and all sorts of things improvised.

And I liked that more
than the shiny French order.

I liked that Italian exuberance
and making-do.

EDWARDS: You can see
from his move to Italy

there is a shift
in his subject matter.

He's no longer producing
Australian scenes.

There are Italian streets
and Autostrade,

and, you know, apartment buildings.

But there's a universality
to the works.

I think they still resonate so much
with an Australian audience

because, of course,
they're still imbued with that

Jeffrey-Smart quality

that is sort of that mix
of the mundane and the surreal,

but the very tight composition.

And I think that time in Italy

led him to distil
all of those elements together

and also gave him the time and space

to fully develop that vision.

Why did Henry James leave America
and go and work in England?

Why did Picasso leave Spain
and go to work in France?

Why did Shakespeare go down
from Stratford and move to London?

Oh.

Hemingway moved to Europe
for a long time.

I think a lot of artists moved
a great deal.

I think I left because I wanted
to see the old masters, in situ.

I couldn't go on
feeding on reproductions.

I wanted to see the pictures.

When he went to Italy,
he wanted to continue his way

in projecting an image
of 20th-century life,

the 20th century architecture
and technology.

But at the same time, he studied
the old masters very carefully,

through their drawings
and their paintings

and how they achieved
what they did achieve.

So it was just a time-honoured way
of making pictures.

Except it wasn't altarpieces
with Madonnas and child

and children
and portraits of the Medicis.

It was images of the 20th century,

but done in the old,
masterly fashion.

The actual process
in most of his works

took many, many, many months
to complete,

starting with preliminary drawings,

through to, then, painted studies,
compositional studies,

then getting bigger, marking in
key sort of figures and motifs

before moving on to the final work,

in which he would actually grid up
these earlier studies

and transpose and translate
all of the detail

from the smaller work
onto the bigger one, painstakingly,

before, of course, then rendering it

in this sort of minute, slick,

almost photographic, at times,
detail that we see in his work.

JAMES: He was painting the future.

He was painting the country
we live in now.

Somebody once said that eventually

everyone will live
in the smart country, in smart-land.

Well, that was a good guess.

And the world now looks like
what Jeffrey was painting

back in the late '60S, in Italy.

In Italy, he was first in Rome.

And then later on, he moved
to his beautiful house near Arezzo,

where he lives now,

the Posticcia Nuova.

What prompted me to leave Rome?

Well, it was getting difficult
to park the car anywhere.

I found that the infrastructure
of Rome was collapsing.

It was changing from being
a small town into a big city.

It was becoming impersonal,
and a lot of my friends were leaving.

They were all
getting houses in Tuscany.

And I thought that
they're all doing this -

what...I should be getting out too.

Because you could feel that
Rome was degenerating

into a big, bustling city,

which is what I didn't want, that.

So I was then encouraged to
look around and look at farmhouses.

PEARCE: At Posticcia Nuova,
the house he bought in Tuscany,

he finally gained something else
that he always dreamed of -

an ideal companion, and a sort of
a harmony with another human being

that enhanced his ability
to practice his art in peace

and not have to worry about
the domestic problems of his life.

And he finally got that when he got
the companionship of Ermes De Zan.

Get the doggies.

I was coming to help Jeffrey
do this mural.

That fell through because of
all that oil crisis, remember?

So Jeffrey said,
look, it's fallen through,

but you've got three months'
summer holidays.

Why don't you fly over?
Which I did.

Right.

Now, where are the magic spices?

They're all down there, underneath.

Don't put that, because it just...
They always end up tasting that...

No. Who's cooking this?
..dreadful curry.

Who is cooking this? Who?

Now...
Well, I wish an Indian was.

I think you have to
share the same interests.

Smell that.

Oh, it smells good.
Smells fresh, doesn't it?

You know, you don't
base it on just lust.

I mean, it's wonderful
if the both come together,

but, boy, it's very rare. (LAUGHS)

Oh, is this the famous tea?

Authentic Indian.

I was taught by an Indian chef.

Did you read, when Gore Vidal
was interviewed,

and...

I mean, we met Gore Vidal,

and they said, "Oh, how was it that

"your relationship with
Chester Coleman was lasted so long?"

He said, "Because we never
went to bed together."

(LAUGHS)

No. "We never had sex together,"
or something.

Oh, yes,
I had a stroke of luck there.

That was a bit of luck,
meeting Ermes. That was great.

Replanted. Ruthlessly.

I think it's wonderful
that they've colonized.

Do you?

Yes, but this has all been
let go out of control.

I like it like that.

Why do you have to have neat
little Adelaide suburban footpaths?

You see the way they attack?

Just because I happen to have been
born in Adelaide. Isn't that unkind?

As I gradually put on
a bit of weight,

Jeffrey'd say, "You bloody well
look after yourself!

"I've got a reputation to uphold."

I'm sorry.
But you know, you always lose.

And at this stage... (LAUGHS)

At this stage, it's just...
There we go.

There we go. Fair enough.
Same old thing.

Wonderful thing about Jeffrey
and all this banter,

you never had a dull moment.

So... (LAUGHS)

Now, don't get nervous
just because you're losing.

(BOTH LAUGH)

The problem at the moment is this -

I've got a vertical there
and the study coincides there.

It doesn't seem to matter very much
at the moment,

but it looks to me, in the painting,

as if I have this big vertical here.

I think it would be much happier

if I try to design it so that the...

..this and this don't coincide.

So I have to decide now.
I think I'll move it over that way.

Just off...

MAN: The portrait of Margaret Olley
was painted in its entirety

in front of a film crew.

It's really the only time

Jeffrey Smart let a camera in
the studio for an extended period.

So we see the portrait of
Margaret Olley being made

from start to finish.

He obviously had seen
the composition

in the Louvre, in Paris.

And he thought,
"Oh, I need a figure."

He always liked a figure, for scale.

Margaret Olley, of course,
was very happy.

She said, "I'm so happy
Jeffrey put me in the Louvre

"rather in the middle
of an Autostrada."

She's a professional painter.
She's a real pro.

The whole thing is integrated -

her work and where she lives.

It's a creation, Margaret's life.

Everybody has difficulty
with drawing figures.

This is what I was saying
with Rafael.

So encouraging to see Rafael
drawing and redrawing

and making sure that
he's getting it right.

You're going to...I'm going to draw
a figure now in this.

So, you'd like to see that.

This is not just to be realistic.

This is to get the right shapes
in the right proportions,

in the right place in the picture.

I think getting a likeness
in portrait painting

is often a gift that
some people have.

I think it's a sort of a...
just a gift.

They can sit down and sketch
and get a likeness.

I don't have much gift of that
at all.

I once read
one of Mr Churchill's things,

and I thought it was very good
because he was not a bad painter.

Did you know that?
He was an amateur painter?

He said, the great thing
about painting

is that the canvas can't hit back.
(LAUGHS)

You can wipe out mistakes
and you can put it in again

and you can crash it out.

The thing is, of course,
is to try and cover your tracks

so that so that nobody can see
where you've made all these changes.

I've made a mistake with this.

I'd have to rub it all out,
because this tracing...

Watch out. Is no good.

It was slightly off.

So now I've had to do another one.

And also another thing,
I realised that this, the red,

tracing through on the red
it wasn't clearly visible enough.

So now I've done
another tracing in green,

and I think this will be better.

I'll been much more careful
with this.

PEARCE: There is
one momentous happening

after the arrival in Italy in 1964,

where we see the real unfolding
of the reason for him being here.

And I think that can be symbolised

when he went to Borgo Sansepolcro,

which was the birthplace
of Piero della Francesca,

his great god of art.

And in the museum
at Borgo Sansepolcro

is a most marvellous painting.

It's a fresco of the Risen Christ.

Well, it was very moving for me,
to actually see it in scale

instead of seeing it by reproduction.

It was very important.

And then here I would be
with the key.

And... I wonder if
the keyhole's still there.

Yes, that's it.

That's the key hole
I would have used.

And...

So then I was able to
just walk straight in.

And when I got in,
I found, by luck, this ladder.

And I was able to put it up
by the fresco,

and climb up and see
the face of Jesus close up,

which was pretty revelatory,
to be able to see how he worked.

How lucky you were.
Wasn't I lucky?

Also indefatigable.

And the figure of Christ stands up
as a great vertical form

above sleeping soldiers,

which occupy the bottom part
of the picture.

And if you draw a line
from the Christ's head

down through the bottom
of the picture,

the vertical joins up and goes right
to the very centre of the earth.

It's the still point
and the centre of all things.

And I think that was a very symbolic
discovery for Jeffrey Smart.

It cemented in place
the course of his own painting,

which was to reach
this ultimate stability,

this point of when time had stopped

and we could contemplate the world

without any of the ravages
that time wreaks upon us.

It's a very idealised
state of being.

I'm going to try and see
what I can see.

Oh. You can see.

If you go up close to the glass,
you can see it.

You can see.

And it's his humility and his care.

I mean, everything, I know,
was carefully drawn beforehand,

which is encouraging to an artist,

to see a great man like Piero

going to a great deal of bother
to do the spadework to start with.

It's an act of humility on his part,

which encourages one's own humility,
which one needs, doesn't one?

The old Masters, when they did this
in big scale,

like Piero and Michelangelo,

they were called sinopia.

And they would use what you see
as a tailor's wheel.

You know, those wheels that tailors
use to pick out and push?

They'd use that to make,

uh, dotted holes in the thing.

And then they would thump
pigment through.

Often, Piero would do the face
and the hands,

the drawings and...

..feet and bits of difficult details.

But perhaps the slave work

of background and other minor figures
was left to assistants.

We don't know much about him,

but we know that
when he travelled from Rome,

because he came from
Borgo Sansepolcro,

we know that he travelled
in great style, with a retinue.

Rather like a film star
travelling with a crew.

The paintings are full
of verbal play, puns,

references that a lot of people
don't always focus on.

One of those is an absolutely
abstract painting, really -

geometrically abstract -

called Closed Shops.

And it consists of
a whole series of garage doors

and each one of them
has over it a name.

And what people don't realise

is that those names refer to
Italian painters,

famous Italian painters,
contemporaries of Jeffrey,

whose painting he does not like.

And one of those is

a very, very well known
Communist Party member

who's a painter called Guttoso.

And Jeffrey has 'macelleria',
which means butcher shop.

Jeffrey Smart always
liked to work from a model.

When he painted a figure,

he did it the classical way

and worked from a life study.

Mr Zan often was
the only person on the farm,

and was often asked to stand in.

So in this work you see
a very good looking Ermes De Zan

in a very drab pair of overalls.

DE ZAN: I liked that, really, a lot.

He did me in profile in that.

He said, "Oh..." -

because I had a lot of chickens
and birds and then peacocks -

and he said, "Oh, I've got you
looking like a bird there."

So... (LAUGHS)

The year after this work was done,

Jeffrey Smart was working
on a portrait of his good friend,

the Australian author David Malouf,

who lived about half an hour away
in Tuscany.

He was struggling
with the composition,

he wasn't happy with
the way the painting was working.

But then he remembered he had
this composition he was happy with,

and he transposed
that portrait of Ermes

into what became
the portrait of David Malouf.

He said, I think -
almost as a joke -

that what it was all about was

he saw me as a writer

who drew chthonic powers
out of the earth.

And so what that pipe was doing,

going through
its little square hole,

was drawing up
these psychic powers.

So there's a reference
in that painting to Ovid,

in the sign that says "OVIDIO",

which is obviously relating
to the great poet, Ovid.

And so, you know, he brings
these playful things in,

so it's playful and serious
at the same time.

And I found a beautiful poem
by David Malouf

where he talks about
things splitting

and going into infinity,

and he refers to the trucks
in the background

that are these different colours.

And this ties in with
the other dimension

that we're talking about
in the exhibition,

which is the geometry

and the way that the figuration
and the geometric come together.

I felt I discovered,
from inside a painting

what the role of figures is

in Jeffrey Smart's painting world.

They set the scale
or they provide a kind of focus.

But they don't really come as
people want them to, with a story.

Their role inside the painting
is purely formal.

Jeffrey always said when people
asked him, "What is the work about?"

And he'd say,
"It's not about anything."

He said,
"I'm not a narrative painter.

"I'm not trying to tell a story."

But when we look at the work,
the imagery that he chooses

makes us question
what's going on there.

I think the Germaine Greer portrait

is much more psychological,
as a portrait,

and as people expect
a portrait to be than mine is.

And I think
he was genuinely interested

in trying to catch
what it was that made her work,

made her the person she is,
the mind that she is.

It's a synthetic painting.

I saw the actual wall
in Melbourne, from a car.

It's the back of
the Melbourne grandstand.

And I made a sketch of that

and then I just needed
a figure somewhere.

And it just happened
that Germaine came over

and I asked to sit in the chair.

She was a very reluctant model.

And I think
it's rather cheeky of me

to call it a portrait
of Germaine Greer.

And she says, "I don't sit like that.

"I'd never sit
with my knees together

"and I would never
have a handbag like that."

All those things, those criticisms,

are absolutely bang-on.

But I do think it looks like her.

When he started painting me,

I thought it was going to be
a big portrait of me

because he did
a very meticulous head study

and he kept up a running commentary
while he was painting me,

mainly about
my physical deficiencies.

Apparently my ears are asymmetrical

and my eyes are unusually small.

There was quite a lot of that.

The results were staggering.
It's a wonderful head study.

I still got it.

And I thought, well, the painting
will be a big version of that.

Jeffrey Smart struggled.
He'd done the charcoal sketch.

He'd done the oil sketch.

He'd started on a composition.

But he couldn't get it to work.

He couldn't get
the likeness to work.

He stopped.
He abandoned the painting.

But in a moment of inspiration,

Smart had seen,
from a metro train in Tokyo,

a large yellow fence.

He sketched it and he thought,
"There's a painting in that."

And then when I got to Sydney
the following year,

the painting, undoubtedly, was big -
it was huge.

It's as...you know,
it's like a tennis court.

But, me, the picture of me

is a very, very tiny thing,
a little dot.

And I got used to that
fairly quickly.

He thinks, jokingly, of course,

that it was a serious effort
to put him down.

But how could you
ever put Clive down?

Ever?

See, you go through fallow periods,

droughts when there's nothing,

When you don't have anything
to paint, there's nothing...

..you don't see anything.

If you work hard,
even, you know, without hope,

then something happens.

The offer of me working
means that I'm offering myself,

"Here, come on, please give me
some ideas, whoever you are."

But you have a feeling that
comes from somewhere else.

DE ZAN: Jeffrey would mention if a
painting was proving very difficult

and having to really work at it.

We would sort of spar
with each other.

And once, I think -
you know, the arrogance of youth -

I just said as
an off-the-cuff sort of thing,

I said, "Oh," I said,

"Why do you bother, when you see
Raphael and Rembrandt and all this?"

And he got very, very upset
about that.

I mean, that really
sort of upset him,

Because, you know,
I think there WERE doubts.

Yeah, but I'm feeling very...
This one's depressing me.

Then I've got that one down there,
which is depressing.

I've got a huge one here
which is really bad.

I'll show that to you.

I mean, it's really...

Things couldn't be worse
at the moment.

This is almost finished, but it's...
it's a bloody disaster.

I mean, really,
it's a hideous picture,

and it's not right.

Perhaps I've finished.
Do you think my career is over?

You do hit flat patches
in your work

when you feel that
it is escaping from you.

Everybody has terribly flat times.
Everybody does.

And it's just that in between those
times of the moments of inspiration,

you've just got to work.

Ben Nicholson said
painting is a form of prayer.

And I believe that.

It's doggedly going on,

and then you wait
for the next push to come.

It's a pathetic position.

Then you get a lovely idea

and the donkey's got the carrot
in front of the nose again

and off you go
and you're happy again.

It's a pathetic condition.

Do you think that'll be better?

Yeah.

Alright, we'll try it.

I was always bewildered by
Jeffrey's expressions of self doubt,

and he would never
explain it very well.

He'd, in fact, run
away from the question.

But finally, several years ago -
it was actually 1995 -

he came clean.

And he made
the most articulate statement

I've ever heard from him

about this issue of
impending doom, disaster, failure,

disappointment in the next painting
he was about to embark upon.

He said, very firmly,

"Look, remember, I came
to live in this country

"to worship at the altars
of the greatest painters

"in the history of art,

"to measure my standards
against them

"and maintain a grasp of reality.

"By that I mean measure,
not equal or surpass them.

"Think of exemplars such as Piero
and Giovanni Bellini and so on.

"The prospect of coming anywhere
near them would be utterly absurd.

"And so in that way,
I always felt doomed to fail.

"Why do you think I rejoice

"to find occasional flaws
in paintings of the great ones?

"It gives hope.

"Such flaws remind me
to be more forgiving of my own."

And I think that's
the most fantastic

kind of summary of his problem

that he carried with him, really,
right from the very beginning.

I'm going to knock it in there now.

I'm on the...

I'm teetering on the brink of
total collapse.

I've just got to check up
and see if the kettle's on.

One of my favourite stories
is about Cezanne.

He used to throw the canvases
out through the window,

and just hurl them out
with absolute rage and despair.

And there's a story that

one day he was walking
in the garden with his son

and saw the picture up in a tree.

And he said to young Paul,

"You know, that could, perhaps, work.

"Do you think you could get it?

"Perhaps I could start it,
work at it again."

And that happens with pictures.

You can you can have a picture
that won't work for you

for months or years.

And you put it aside,
put it in these racks.

And then every now and again,

you bring out them...bring them out

and think, "Perhaps I could do
this or that."

Some, of course, defeat you always.

Some go through smoothly.

There's no rules.

DE ZAN: If a painting didn't
come off, he'd burn it.

And Jeffrey was very aware
if he overworked a painting,

you'd lose
the surface of the canvas.

It would...

He said if you've got
a linoleum effect on the painting,

you killed it, you know?

Which is why he would really
keep a painting fresh.

There are very bad times

when I haven't...
when I've run out of things

and I haven't got anything.

And I go through all my old sketches
and I think,

"Could you work that into a picture?"

You get the light
hitting the building.

What I do then, is I...

I go off in the car
and meander around and mope around.

If it's clear,
if the weather's clear,

if there's a sidelight,

particularly early morning
or late in the evening,

and I mope around
all the places near me -

the indus...'cause I'm in
an industrial part of Italy,

as you know.

And I just look at things
and I get little ideas,

and I think oh, perhaps
we'll work that up into a thing.

Ermes and I were
driving down to Greece.

I'd already had a request
from the Victorian Arts Council

to do a mural.

And they showed me the drawings,

and there was this long thing,
like that.

I mean, really long.

What could I do? A motor car?

Or a man or a woman
standing there at a factory?

I don't know.
I just thought it's just too long.

I can't. It's never...

Well, how can I fill a space
long and thin like that?

We were sitting in the car,
we were driving through the thing,

and there we saw this
heavenly container train

of different colours

threading its way through trees.

And we both looked through this,
the saplings and things,

and Ermes said, "There's the mural."

He said it first.

And I said, "By God, it is, isn't it?
Yes, that's it."

ROGERS: His lifetime output is quite
small for an Australian artist.

His total number of works
is probably about 2,500,

including drawings.

You want to compare that
to somebody, say such as Boyd -

you're probably looking, 10,000.

Whiteley - probably a few more,
15,000.

Nolan - probably 20,000-plus.

But smart he would spend
months, even, sometimes years,

getting a composition right

before he was happy to
let it go out of the studio

and into a show.

I don't want people to
read too much into things.

I want them to look at the shapes.

Whereas I think that long elliptical
shape of a man in a dark suit

is a fairly...just a dark shape,
but it makes a nice volume.

You know that in one book
it got the misprint.

There was a misprint
because of my handwriting.

And I said...

The question was, "Why do you put
men with bald heads?"

And I said, "It makes
a LONELY volume," it came out as.

I never said that.
I said it makes a LOVELY volume.

(WHISPERS) But lonely volume...
You see?

"Oh, he means something by that."

Do you think life got past him by?
He's Prufrock?

He is a sort of a semi
T.S. Eliot character, perhaps.

Yes.

FITZPATRICK:
The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Let us go, then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out
against the sky

Like a patient etherized
upon a table,

Let us go, through certain
half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night
cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants
with oyster-shells -

Streets that follow
like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to
an overwhelming question...

Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"

Let us go and make our visit.

I grow old... I grow old...

I shall wear the bottoms
of my trousers rolled.

Shall I put my hair behind?
Do I dare eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers,
and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaid singing,
each to each.

I do not think they will sing to me.

MALOUF: The thing that impressed me,
as I watched him work,

in thinking about
his life as a painter,

is how carefully constructed
all the paintings are,

and how much intellectual criticism

is brought to bear on the thing,

however intuitive
and however immediate

the idea may be.

But I was also impressed
by the fact that

when I got to see the work,
going back a very long way,

how coherent it is.

How, once he has hit on the kind of
painter he feels he can best be,

he sticks to that
and is absolutely undiverted

in his exploration of
all the complexities that offers

and all the distance
it will take him.

PEARCE: A few years ago,
when I visited Jeffrey in Tuscany,

he suddenly read this poem by
Thomas Hardy called Heredity.

I realised it's about posterity

and almost a fear about
"What happens after I'm gone?"

And I think in the end, the poem
is quite symbolic of his own work.

What is going to survive him
is his work.

And he says, I will be my work.

I think that's what that poem is.

And here's the party poem,

which, I think I know it
by heart anyway.

You want me to recite it?
MAN: Yes.

I am the family face,

Flesh perishes I live on,

Projecting trait and trace

Through time to time anon,

And jumping from place to place

Into oblivion.

The years-heired feature that can

With curve and voice and eye

Despise the human span
Of durance - that is I,

The eternal thing in man,

That heeds no call to die.

God, it's a marvellous poem.

Yes.

What a nice chap he was.

This is a very old cemetery
at a place called Migliari.

It's at the top of a valley

which looks down
over Jeffrey Smart's house.

And this is the cemetery
where Jeffrey wants to be buried.

It's got that ethereal quality,

looking out over the whole
of Tuscany, the Valdarno,

and the sense of
a great passage of time,

going back centuries, to aeons,

contracted into an eternal moment.

Which kind of fits in with
the kind of thing

that Jeffrey is trying
to achieve in his painting,

its sense of timelessness
or arresting time.

That time doesn't matter anymore.

Because what happened long time ago
is just evident

by gazing out
over this beautiful landscape.

The final painting is Labyrinth,

completed in 2011,

after which Jeffrey declared
his retirement from painting.

It's a very enigmatic image.

You can see that
through the stone labyrinth

is a kind of geometric landscape

that stretches
as far as the eye can see.

And I think it evokes a memory
of his childhood in Adelaide

when he fell in love with all those
back lanes and alleyways and...

And it was a kind of child's heaven.

And Labyrinth really transports us
back in time to that memory.

HART: I think this painting
does take us full circle, in a way,

that it is dealing with
metaphysical ideas

that he was interested in
from his youth.

But I also think it's a painting
that looks to the future.

It's like about infinity.

You know, look at that maze
and the way it isn't constrained.

It goes on and on.
So it's the possibilities of life.

It's like all of us
are trying to find our way

through all these exits
and different entry ways,

and we get it wrong
and then we find another way.

But it's also extending to something
beyond what we can actually see.

But I always thought that painting
was such a small thing,

and it was all we could do
was to paint a picture.

How does that compare with
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony?

T.S. Eliot wrote,

Words move, music moves,

but that which is only living

Can only die.

Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence.

As a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

And I thought, "Oh, there we have it.
He's saying what art CAN do."

I'm convinced that Eliot must
have known a lot about painting.

If a good painting comes off,
it has a stillness.

It has a perfection.

And that's as great as anything

that, I think, as a musician
or a poet can do.

Captions by Red Bee Media

Copyright
Australian Broadcasting Corporation